[On October 16,
1916, Margaret
Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in New York City. So this
week, on the 100th anniversary of that moment, I’ll AmericanStudy
Sanger and other histories and images connected to this still-controversial
subject, leading up a special weekend post highlighting a great scholarly book
on the topic!]
How the history of the
combined
oral contraceptive pill (COCP) echoes my first two posts in this series,
and one way it differs.
1)
Sanger’s role: Margaret Sanger, subject of
Monday’s post and the inspiration for this series, remained active and
prominent in the birth control movement right up until her death in 1966. At a
1951 Manhattan dinner hosted by Planned Parenthood Vice President Abraham
Stone, Sanger met Gregory
Pincus, a reproductive physiologist at Harvard University and the
co-founder of the Worcester
Foundation for Experimental Biology (WFEB). Pincus and his fellow
researchers had met with numerous roadblocks in their efforts to research
hormonal contraceptives, but with the support of Sanger and especially her
friend Katharine
Dexter McCormick, a longtime feminist activist and philanthropist, the work
finally began to move forward. McCormick helped bring another Harvard researcher,
Professor of
Gynecology John Rock, into that work as well, and over the next few years Pincus
and Rock (and many other collaborating researchers) developed the prototypes
for COCP.
2)
The Pill and Women’s Choices: It’s not the
slightest bit of an overstatement to say that when the pill finally arrived in
America in the early 1960s (delayed by both scientific and political issues)
it completely and permanently changed
the issues of sexuality, reproduction, and control about which I wrote in
Tuesday’s post. It didn’t do so without a number of further controversies and
battles, however, from medical
debates over the pill’s potential side effects to religious and
political efforts to limit the pill’s availability. Indeed, it was not until
the Supreme Court’s decision in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
that married woman in all fifty states had access to prescriptions for the pill
and other such contraceptives; and not until 1972’s Eisenstadt v. Baird
that unmarried women in all states did. The following year’s decision in Roe v. Wade is, as I wrote on Tuesday,
generally the focus of debates over women’s bodies and the law—but to my mind
it’s the multi-decade history of the pill that truly reflects the contentious
and vital evolution of those issues throughout the 20th century.
3)
Cultural Prominence: While birth control had
thus certainly played a role in American culture and society since at least
Sanger’s first clinic, I would argue that the pill came to occupy a far more
prominent and widespread place than had any prior item or issue in that
longstanding history. The Senate held
hearings on the pill in 1970, which culminated (among other results) in
Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Robert
Finch adding a warning statement to all subsequent sales. Even more
tellingly, country music superstar Loretta Lynn released a controversial song
titled “The Pill” on
her 1975 album Back to the Country, a
text about the pill’s effects on women, marriage, and society that truly
indicates how broadly and deeply the pill had permeated American culture. While
of course Roe v. Wade would help
catapult abortion into an even more prominent place in these evolving
conversations and debates, it seems to me that it was the pill which set the
stage for the abortion debate—and revising our narratives accordingly would
also change our contemporary conversations about these issues.
Next post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or images you’d highlight?
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